Systems and methods herein generally relate to print spoolers and more particularly to a spooler having dynamic load balancing.
In print spooling, documents formatted for printing are stored and later retrieved by a printer at the printer's own rate. With spooling, multiple processes can write documents to a print queue without waiting. As soon as the spooler retrieves a document from a process, the process can perform other tasks, while a separate printing process operates the printer.
Without spooling, a word processor would be unable to continue until printing finished. Spooler or print management software allows priorities to be assigned to jobs, notifies users when their output has been printed, distributes jobs among several printers, allows forms or paper to be changed (or selects such automatically), generates banner pages to identify and separate print jobs, etc. A batch processing system uses spooling to maintain a queue of ready-to-run jobs that can be started as soon as the system has the resources to process them.